Andy Rubin Is Heading a Secret Robotics Project At Google

sfcrazy writes "The creator of the most sought after 'Android' of the world has been secretly working on creating a robotics division within Google. The search engine giant has acquired over seven robotics companies recently to create the robotics unit which is being headed by none other than Andy Rubin himself. Andy made the disclosure in an interview given to the New York Times." Their initial goal is to automate the woefully manual process of electronics manufacturing.

Comments

Going to change everything

[Maxo-Texas]

It's not long. And I don't think people will be ready to cope with the change.
They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.

At least a generation of severe disruption and even after that very likely structural unemployment over 25%. You will need to change society in some fundamental ways. Basic income is one possibility.

Re:Going to change everything

[Thanshin]

They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.

That tool already exists. It's called "junior IT consultant".

Of course it's still unable to socialize with humans, but we're working on it.

Re:Going to change everything

[xtal]

It's called a guaranteed minimum income.

The writing is on the wall, and creative endeavors that humans enjoy will dominate more of society. Isn't that what we all want? To do what we want?

The concept is from the right, it's been around for a long time, and it's a fairly straightforward implementation. If a society is rich enough that the production costs approach zero, then ..

Of course, it smells a lot like the dreaded socialism monster. Or worse.. red pink communism!

There's no rocket science here. It will happen eventually, as the poor people get to vote. Either with ballots, or otherwise.

Re:Going to change everything

[Catbeller]

More prisons, more Randism, more upper class loathing of the "lazy", less food assistance, less of any financial assistance, removal of affordable housing, drastic anti-loitering laws, and finally really nasty anti-rioting weapons and roundup tactics against agitators.

I'm not describing the dystopic future - I'm describing the reaction right now. And the anti-poor crackdown will only intensify. The riots will be christened "terrorism" and all those lovely laws we've created since 2001 will finally find their real use.

Re:Going to change everything

[Catbeller]

The sky did fall. The protestors of the 1800's were correct. The people displaced by technology in the 1800s fell into poverty and early death, and England, for instance, was home to immense poverty and despair. We don't want to remember, which is not the same thing as not-happened. We choose to remember the happy industrialist and middle-class lifestyles which came from impoverishing the workers, not the majority of miserable people they created by re-distributing the wealth from the majority of the working people to their own class.

thing to remember is that the people who were protesting their replacement by machines weren't really asking for history to be rolled back - they wanted to be *cut in on the profits* created by removing them from the books. They wanted some income redistribution. They lost. Since they didn't run university history courses, as industrialists did, they have been expunged from our collective memory and rendered into silly people who didn't want to stop making horse collars by hand.

The price of all this will be misery, violence, hunger and early death for hundreds of millions of people, eventually, if history repeats. Looks like "yes". And no one will want to take notice, other than intense coverage of the violence in the "bad" neighborhoods.

Re:Going to change everything

[jeffb (2.718)]

Seriously, what is our long term goal as humans?

Oh, I don't know -- maybe not having to spend half our waking hours, for over half our lives, doing something that we'd rather not be doing, except that we'll be homeless and starving otherwise?

Sure, there are some of us lucky enough to get paid for doing what we'd choose to do anyway. There are even a lot of us who would make terribly unwise choices about what to do with our time if we didn't have to work for a living. But if we have a grand refactoring that separates "earning a living" from "having a career", I'm not sure it's necessarily a catastrophe.

Re:Going to change everything

[Saethan]

not everybody will be in the top 1%

In fact, I'd be willing to say about 1% of people will be in the top 1%

Re:Going to change everything

[scamper_22]

While I agree, I think you overstate what they wanted.

People aren't that complicated. They aren't really interested in getting a cut of the profits. They aren't particularly interested in income distribution.

What people want is to be OK. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And people who used to be OK and then were suddenly not OK being displaced by a machine... are going to protest.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I find the language we have to use today absolutely silly. As if you need to have a moral reason to just want to be OK. We feel the need to demonize profits and say its only fair workers get a cut of the profits. And what about the person who ever had a good job to begin with? And they suddenly not deserving of the cut of profits?

Let's be honest about it. People want to be OK.
And when you have something disruptive, the society had better make sure there are ways to be OK.

Maybe it's income redistribution.
Maybe it's government creating jobs for people.
Maybe it's getting out of government so the cost of living goes down.
Maybe it's organizing work sharing programs so more the actual work is spread out.
Maybe it's training people for new work. ...

Whatever it is... but people just want to be OK... and that's a good enough moral reason to do something. You don't need anything else beyond that. You are a person and you want to live a comfortable life.

Re:Going to change everything

[miroku000]

The sky did fall. The protestors of the 1800's were correct. The people displaced by technology in the 1800s fell into poverty and early death, and England, for instance, was home to immense poverty and despair.

Do you have any sources for that claim? From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment "The Luddite events of 1811 were the beginning of humankind's analysis of whether it is possible for technological unemployment to be other than temporary and confined to particular industries and firms. Contrary to the Luddites' fears, technological advancement did not ruin Britain's economy or systemically lower standards of living throughout the following decades of the 19th century. In fact, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the opposite happened, as technology helped Britain to become much less impoverished than before. For this reason, some economists think that the general Luddite premise is fundamentally flawed, and thus they apply the term Luddite fallacy to it."

Secret?

[scuzzlebutt]

I guess it's not so secret anymore...

So, capitalism will fail and most people seem to..

[waspleg]

have an allergy to anything that resembles socialism even if that's what they really want and don't know it (speaking as an American here). I just read an article somewhere yesterday that both Applebees and Chili's restaurant chains are replacing all of their waiters with a tablet based systems.

When there is no work for anyone left and we're all under total 24/7/365 surveillance then what? I can't have Amazon delivering packages to my non-existent residence since robots took our jobs ;) (I'm in IT but it's not like we're immune; no one is).

Re:So, capitalism will fail and most people seem t

[waspleg]

(arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)

        "Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking
        down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over
        a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead...
        does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system
        doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"

"Woefully manual"???

[Catbeller]

Woefully for whom? The last few manufacturing jobs in the industry and the people who work them are woeful?

Where the hell is anyone going to get a job other than cleaning rich people's toilets? Hell, there's probably a robot for that.

Shantytowns are illegal most everywhere, so people can't even squat in the mud and eat trash in peace when they lose their livelihoods. Should we just suggest 90% of the planet's human population just get it over with and off itself?

Electronics Manufacturing is already automated

[braindrainbahrain]

Exactly what part of electronics manufacturing needs to be automated? The cheap prices and mass production of electronics we currently enjoy is partly due to widespread use of pick-and-place machines and wave soldering machines. I'm sure there are some manual steps in the assembly, but that is only the last 10 - 20% of the labor involved in manufacturing. The bulk of it has been automated for decades.

Re:Huh?

[UnderCoverPenguin]

The company I work for has a 5000 sq meter manufacturing facility packed full of robots - and only 5 engineers and 10 technicians. The manufacturing, assembly, packing and shipping are all automated. Even the maintenance is mostly automated.